I sometimes have to write for a while before I figure it out, pretend that I know what I'm doing, sort of like ad-libbing on stage until you remember….

I liked the push and pull of that, between the outer political world and the inner personal lives of the characters. It's also real life... Many of u….

The thematic links came a little later, after I noticed I was gravitating towards certain elements - war, city, weather. So it wasn't all planned out….

An initial impulse of mine was to portray the way in which a city is impacted by war. But this is vague, no? After all, how do you actually have an e….

I was trying to hold up a mirror to this country, to reflect the past years or so, and the varying degrees in which we've been affected by the war(s)….

Such platitudes as "If you believe it, it will happen," "If you give 100%, you get 100%," "Good things happen to good people" people utter when we do….

I don't work with an outline, except a vague one in my head, a general idea of character, place, arc... I'm like a composer with a symphony in their ….

[Ending] is partly drawn from a desire to shock the audience, to brutally de-romanticize what many Americans think is happening overseas. And partly ….

When the ending finally comes to me, I often have to backtrack and make the beginning point towards that ending. Other times, I know exactly what the….

Since most of the action of the war actually happens off the page (offstage), I wanted to give the characters something they had to contend with on a….

This is one of the ways fiction is more liberating than nonfiction - I don't have to be so concerned with fact. I had the paradigm of certain people ….

I don't feel any ethical dilemma when I write. In my memoir, I was able to write with candor about the two most difficult people in the world to writ….

But it's hard for me to pinpoint where all my characters and dialogue come from - imagination or real life. My memoir, of course, was all about my pa….

Love and happiness inextricably combined? I wanted love stories to coincide with war stories, I wanted hope for my characters, I wanted a sense of a ….

The benefit of writing a collection - as opposed to a novel - is that I'm able to have some version of the war in each story without having to commen….

Of course, I had a paradigm of a certain city in my head when I wrote these stories, a city that inspired my imagination, but it was only inspiration..